Thierry Smits

Born in Koersel (Belgium), Thierry Smits studied ballet and modern dance in Brussels and Paris. After a short career as a dancer, he soon began choreographing.

With his first choreography, La Grace du Tombeur, presented in 1990 at the Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels, he quickly gained international acclaim in the world of contemporary dance. Since then he has been a tireless choreographer for his own company and other theatre companies and groups.

In his performances, oscillating between pure dance and dramatization, and in which his technical rigor and gestural inventiveness are always present, mankind’s relationship to sex and the sacred frequently occupies a central role.

The body - as object of desire, pleasure and finiteness – has been the very subject of Thierry Smits’s choreographic research over the past several years. This is not only because the body is obviously the subject matter and tool of the choreographer’s trade, but also with Eros délétère (1991), followed by the solo Cyberchrist (1995), Corps(e) (1998) and Red Rubber Balls (1999), Thierry Smits has founded his work upon the very notion of corporality and the tensions that exist between the climaxing body, the “body as sex”, and the intimately diseased body that is doomed to disappear.

In addition to his work focused on complex subjects and linked to an element “outside” dance, Thierry Smits concentrates on dance itself – referring to nothing other than itself -, as he had done for the first time in Soirée Dansante (1995). With Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain (2001), Dionysos’ Last Day / Stigma (2003), D’ORIENT (2005) and To the Ones I Love (2010), he continues this line begun previously giving priority to a study of form, choreographic composition, and the search for movement.

Thierry Smits was recognised in 1995 when he received the SACD-Belgium prize, and again in 1998, for his creation Corps(e), for which he received the Belgium Océ prize for the performing arts of the French speaking community.